Orthopedic procedures involve resurfacing, replacement, or reconstruction of joints using multi-component prosthesis with articulating surfaces. In such procedures proper placement of the prosthetic component is critical for longevity of the implant, positive clinical outcomes, and patient satisfaction. Often this requires surgical instrumentation for proper cutting or re-shaping of the bone to accommodate the prosthetic component. For example, in knee replacement surgery, cutting guides or blocks that are positioned using mechanical guides are utilized to make cuts on the patient's bone. The orientation and position of such cuts with respect to anatomic axes and/or landmarks is critical to ensure proper placement of the prosthetic component. This requires precise placement of the cutting guides or blocks.
Existing methods for placement of the cutting guides or blocks typically require the use of rudimentary mechanical instrumentation that are bulky, cumbersome, and add time to the procedure. There are also prone to errors depending of the subjective assessment and experience level of the surgeon. Some computer/robotically-assisted surgical systems provide a platform for more reliably estimating cut placement parameters. These systems typically require complex and sophisticated tracking equipment, bulky markers/sensors, time-consuming instrument calibration/registration procedures, and highly-specialized software packages that often require technical support personnel to work with doctor in the operating room. Not only do such systems tend to be costly, they also tend to be far too complex to warrant broad adoption among orthopedic surgeons.
To overcome the accuracy and reliability issues associated with manual methods for determining joint placement parameters, while providing a cost-effective and relatively user-friendly approach that is unavailable in computer/robotically-assisted systems, a cost-effective, portable, and user-friendly tool and associated methods for placement of surgical instrumentation would be advantageous. The presently disclosed system and associated methods for intra-operatively measuring surgical instrument placement parameters during orthopedic arthroplastic procedures are directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above and/or other problems in the art.